Lurking in the Historia Augusta's life of the short-lived Emperor Carus is what appears to be a reference to the genuine contemporary poet Nemesianus and an extant work by him, the Cynegetica. Given the HA's predilection for ‘bogus authors’, this is rather surprising, but because some of what the HA says about Nemesianus is true, the otherwise unique details of his life and works that it provides have been generally accepted. We show first that the reference to the Cynegetica is an incorporated gloss in the text of the HA, one that reveals that the text was being read and studied in northern Francia. We then demonstrate that the name ‘Olympius’, which the HA gives to Nemesianus, is not authentic, offering an analysis of the text's onomastic habits more generally. We show that ‘Olympius Nemesianus’ is one of several invented authors in the HA, lent a superficial plausibility by borrowing the name of a real ancient writer. Finally, we reflect on the way that these conclusions might undermine two developing tendencies in the study of the Historia Augusta.

This article examines two attempted senatorial coups against Pertinax during his brief reign in 193 CE. By examining literary and epigraphic evidence related to these coups, I argue that Pertinax's political opponents in 193 should be understood to come from a particular political and dynastic network, and that this network represents the final attempt of the connections of Lucius Verus to compete for the imperial power. Further support for this argument is adduced via an analysis of Pertinax's dismissal from a procuratorial post in 170, where there is circumstantial and prosopographical evidence to suggest opposition deriving from connections of this same network earlier in his career. I conclude by discussing how, through the analysis of these coups and similar incidents, we may gain insights into socio-political conflicts at a crisis point for the imperial aristocracy, and how they illustrate the ongoing importance of Antonine dynastic politics, ever-present but sometimes difficult to see.

This article re-evaluates the role of the manuscript tradition of the Historia Augusta in debates over the original contents and authorship of the text. Evidence for physical disruptions to the text before our oldest surviving manuscripts points to an earlier manuscript distributed across multiple codices. A multi-volume archetype eliminates critical arguments against the author's claims about lives missing before the Life of Hadrian as well as in the lacuna for the years a.d. 244–260. Other multi-volume codices of the eighth and ninth centuries show that loss of an initial volume would have disrupted the textual tradition for the index, titles and authorial attributions. Comparison of our most complete early witness, Pal. lat. 899, to the independent branches of the textual tradition shows discrepancies between these paratextual elements as expected in a disrupted tradition. Ultimately, this article concludes that the current debates on authorship and the original scope of the Historia Augusta rest on paratextual elements from a single branch of the manuscript tradition, raising doubts about the centrality of these controversies to understanding the work.

This paper presents a new manuscript of part of the Historia Augusta from Erlangen, which vindicates a more than century-old hypothesis by E. Patzig: that the 1489 Venice edition of the work is textually valuable. On this basis, and building on the recent work of R. Modonutti, I present five new passages that are not printed in modern editions of the HA, six lacunose passages restored, and propose that the lost Murbach manuscript is the source. Armed with this new evidence, I re-examine the question of the great lacuna between the Lives of Maximus and Balbinus and the Lives of the Two Valerians, showing that it is a codicological — and not authorial — feature.

This article presents an English translation and analysis of a new historical fragment, probably from Dexippus’ Scythica, published by Gunther Martin and Jana Grusková in 2014. The fragment, preserved in a palimpsest in the Austrian National Library, describes a Gothic attack on Thessalonica and the subsequent preparations of the Greeks to repel the barbarian force as it moved south into Achaia. The new text provides several important details of historical, prosopographical and historiographical significance, which challenge both our existing understanding of the events in Greece during the reign of Gallienus and the reading of the main literary sources for this period. In this article we look to secure the Dexippan authorship of the fragment, identify the individuals named in the text, and date the events described in the text to the early 260s a.d.